It didn't really feel like Lent yet, in the same way that for many people it doesn't feel like Christmas if there's no snow on the ground (these people all live in the Northern Hemisphere, by the way). But comes now Candida Moss writing for The Daily Beast, who having perused at least one biblical studies journal brings forth in deathless prose our annual assurance that Easter is on its way with her March 9 article "Everyone's Favorite Gospel Is a Forgery." Because you see, we just can't have Easter without some clueless uncovering of the kind of research nearly every seminary or religious studies student has seen just under a million times about how Everything You Ever Believed About the Bible Is Wrong, You Credulous Uneducated Simpletons.
Dr. Moss reports on a March 2020 Journal of New Testament Studies article by Dr. Hugo Mendez, an assistant professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill. In it, Dr. Mendez suggests that a long-held belief of New Testament scholars -- that the gospel of John and the three letters that bear the Apostle's name come from a community of believers perhaps originally founded by the Apostle himself -- is untrue.
Beginning in the 19th century Biblical scholars began to seriously question whether any of the gospels were written by their named authors. The ancient world was not nearly as persnickety about actual authorship and accepted the practice that followers of a particular teacher might publish work under that teacher's name even if he didn't actually write it. Mark, it seemed, was written first. Matthew and Luke seemed to have drawn on Mark and an additional document, as well as their own sources. Since much of these studies were being done by German scholars, the letter Q came to be the shorthand name for this theorized shared source as the German world translated "source" is Quelle.
John, on the other hand, was clearly recognized as the product of an entirely different set of source material. Scholars skeptical of the claim that the author was the actual Apostle himself suggested that it may have come from a religious community he founded and which gathered up sayings and stories he had related about Jesus into the gospel and then the three "Johannine Letters." Dr. Mendez, though, thinks that this community didn't exist.
The actual journal article is behind a paywall. Though Dr. Moss is herself a New Testament professor (at the University of Birmingham in England), her work for The Daily Beast includes articles such as one linking modern Peloton use with the ancient practices of mortification of the body by Christian hermits and martyrs. So color me reluctant to lean heavily on the kind of analysis she produces for TDB. But my guess is that Dr. Mendez breaks no new ground and offers evidence that suggests his conclusion may be accurate, nothing more. At least, the little that I can glean from the article abstract at the JNTS site hints he's not saying anything I didn't hear more than once while at seminary myself.
In any event, Dr. Mendez is a piker when it comes to fiddling with the gospel of John. German theologian Rudolf Bultmann, beginning with his early 1941 monograph Das Evangelium des Johannes (published in English in 1971 as The Gospel of John) suggested that John contains a specific Signs Gospel within its accounts and he actually re-arranged large chunks of the book to better suit his interpretation.
Bultmann's radical transformation of the gospel was so extensive that few New Testament scholars are willing to accept it, even when they approve of other conclusions he made in this work and elsewhere. When a friend posted a link to the DB story on his Facebook page, I commented that Bultmann, reading this work, would have said simply, "Halten Sie mein Bier."
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